wireless issues

[dshuck]

I have been running a number of distros on my laptop lately just trying to get a good feel of each. One repeated issue revolves around wireless networking and each distro seems to have it's own solutions. Here is where I am, and I would appreciate any insight on the problem.

On first boot in verbose mode I could see a failure on my wireless card. After recently using Mandriva One 2007, and with that seemingly being a similar distro in many ways, I tried adding the IPW2100 firmware that is available at http://ipw2100.sf.net. With Mandriva, as soon as I did this, wireless worked without issue. However, with fedora, it got me closer, but not quite there. Now when I boot in verbose mode, I see it enable that card as eth1 and it acquires an IP address from one of my apprently gracious neighbors. In fact, this post is coming courtesy of their open linksys router.

So, that seems promising but now it is time to connect it to *my* router. In KDE, I did yum install knetworkmanager. When I click on that applet, rather than see a list of networks I see "NetworkManager is not working". After toying with that a bit and making no progress, I decided to switch to gnome and see what nm-applet showed. Interestingly, it shows that I am disconnected, but I can view all surrounding networks, including my own. When I attempt to join my own network, I am prompted for the key and such, but when I attempt a connection it fails. At this point, I do actually lose my default connection to the neighbor's network. After and ifdown/ifup eth1, I get that back, but still nm-applet shows no connection.

While I was shooting blanks I decided to try the following set of instructions offered by forum user Nickisgod1:

$su -
#yum install kernel-devel
or
#yum kernel-xen-devel
depending on what you need
#exit
$svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/trunk madwifi
$cd madwifi
$ make
$su
# make install
#/sbin/modprobe ath_pci
# gedit /etc/modprobe.conf
add these lines
alias wifi0 ath_pci
alias ath0 ath_pci
options ath_pci autocreate=sta

I can't see anything that this actually accomplished on my systems as I am still seeing the same exact behavior. Does anyone have any advice on what to do next?

Thanks in advance

[DamianS]

Make sure the networkmanager and networkmanager dispatcher daemons are running.

[ppesci]

The instructions you follow is for Atheros chips, and your card is an Intel. I think this doesn't work.

Go to:

http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/

for details on how to configure and install software

Your problem may be is for WEP or WPA in your router. Can you try to disable it and try to connect then?

HTH